The Biggest Fish Ever Caught: A Long String of (Mostly) True Stories

How did they do it? What are the secrets of the fishermen who've landed the world's greatest trophy fishes? The Biggest Fish Ever Caught will tell the tales behind the International Game Fishing Association's record-holding fish, including where they were bagged, what lines/lures the anglers used, and other tips and tricks. The dozen stories here are filled/i>

Overview

How did they do it? What are the secrets of the fishermen who've landed the world's greatest trophy fishes? The Biggest Fish Ever Caught will tell the tales behind the International Game Fishing Association's record-holding fish, including where they were bagged, what lines/lures the anglers used, and other tips and tricks. The dozen stories here are filled with amazing action and intriguing characters. They'll take you to lakes, streams, and oceans around the world and explore catch and release vs blood sport fishing, stocking and bioengineering, conservation – and controversy. All the while revealing the sorts of secrets fishermen don't usually like to share.

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Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Fishermen who strive for world angling records are of a strange and singular breed: part athlete, part artist, part predator, part mad scientist—and totally obsessed. In this entertaining and exciting book, author Andrew Vietze tells the stories of over a dozen modern-day Ahabs for whom landing the largest specimen of a particular species—everything from piranhas to largemouth bass to hammerhead sharks—looms larger than Mount Everest or the Nobel Prize." —Paul Guernsey, author of Beyond Catch & Release: Exploring the Future of Fly Fishing, and former editor of Fly Rod & Reel

Read an Excerpt

The Biggest Fish Ever Caught

Lyons Press

A twenty-six-year-old auto mechanic from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Adam Konrad was fishing the province's famous man-made Lake Diefenbaker one June day when he reeled in an astonishingly large rainbow trout – a 28.3-pound beauty. It was a new provincial record – but not quite as big as the 10-lb-line-class world-record rainbow caught on the same lake two years prior by Duane Farden. That one weighed 30.6 pounds. Not long after, Adam's identical twin, Sean, landed a big one, too. Between the two of them, the Konrad brothers hauled in a stream of giants during the span of three weeks. After the 28 pound fish came a 30 pounder and then the grande dame – these were all female fish – a 33.3 pounder.

The Konrads kept coming back, driving the 85 miles from their homes in Saskatoon to fish “Lake Dif”. And they kept pulling in massive fish, until Adam hooked a 43.6 pound rainbow and beat the world record.

Turns out there was a reason all these fish were so huge. They were escapees from CanGro Fish Farm, an aquaculture operation that raised genetically engineered rainbows in pens at head of Diefenbaker. CanGro harvest more than 2 million pounds of rainbow meat each year. These were special fish bred for the restaurant market, and they are not like their common cousins. Known as triploids – they have three chromosomes rather than the usual two, which renders them sterile. “They don't reproduce, therefore they can put more energy into their growth,” says Norm Dyck, a fisheries biologist for the Province of Saskatchewan. “That's basically why they can get so big.” Indeed, the fish are famous for eating and eating and eating and growing and growing and growing.

The triploids escaped that fateful night in 2000 when a big piece of ice tore a hole in their containment pen. More than 500,000 of them – Wildwest Steelhead – as the company called them, swam off that evening and began new lives as Diefenbaker gamefish.